Joan Osborne to sing Dylan in Duluth on the eve of Bob’s 78th birthday

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Joan Osborne has performed and recorded with Bob Dylan, but she doesn’t claim to really “know” him. “I think he’s a very mercurial person,” she said in 2017, shortly after releasing an album of Dylan covers. “So, I think I’m probably just as in the dark as anyone else when taking on his songs, but I don’t think you necessarily have to know a songwriter in order to find a way to interpret their work.”

The Grammy nominee has another connection to Dylan’s early years, having come up on the same New York coffeehouse scene, albeit a generation later. “When you’re playing in the nightclub scene in Greenwich Village,” she said in a statement, “his trail is everywhere, and not just because he played in the same places, but because people still perform his music every night.”